ABAP Release News: WIIFM?

There must be some reason and good use for the recently announced new ABAP features. But, like Tom Hank’s character in the famous movie scene, I don’t get it.

• CDS types keep multiplying and now we have table entities. This seems in line with SAP’s strategy of moving away from DDIC and “decoupling” everything. But then there is the note that these are not supported by ABAP RAP. So, uh… what do we do with them then?

• Then there are “writable view entities”. I diligently read Help article (it’s very short) and did not understand anything. I know the words but put together, what do they mean? If someone can make sense of it, please let me know in the comments.

• Have you ever dreamt of declaring a client column of a client-independent data source? No? Well, now you can, anyways.

• This new feature in ADT sounds interesting: IDE Actions. There is this Help, this blog post and even the video that all describe how you can create one. But what are they exactly? What do they do? What problems do they solve? Are these like Excel macros? Can we use these for some sort of DIY Joule? Unfortunately, I still don’t have a clear answer myself.

I really miss recently retired Horst Keller’s blog posts (exhibit A) where he shared examples with enthusiasm and always made me look forward to an upgrade (or even plead for it). Now it’s like cool story, bro, but what do we do with all this? JP